July 2017

Dear Aram,

You’re on your way to Korea right now. Do you like to fly? That’s a long time to travel, even if you do, so I hope you’re resting and comfortable, that the time is passing quickly. Here’s where I’ll put you: on a plane, dreaming over water. And here’s me, on a balcony next to the Willamette River. I can hear screaming kids—not mine, for once—down in the courtyard, pretending they are being mauled by wild animals. They take turns doing the dying and the escaping and the attacking, though I can’t make out the particular predator. Let’s say, for our purposes, that they are being attacked by pigs.

I’m so happy to be back in touch with you after many years apart, and I’m even happier to be talking about our stories in No Tokens. You had me at the pigs in “A Better Way to Be.” Before that even, you had me at Big G’s warning for Twilight to “hold onto [her] pigtails.” This seems to be a warning to the reader, a heads up that what is coming is wholly original, that they need to pay close attention. “I will teach you a trade,” Big G says, meaning the pig trade, and I felt a gorgeous tug, for my favorite stories are the ones that teach me how to read them. Every sentence here is informed and reformed by what came before, and there is a playfulness to this, but also (am I projecting, now that I know the end?) a feeling of dread. Maybe it’s how the sentences bleed into each other, how they steal and strip apart what’s already been said.

Aside from letting the language rub against itself in this way, did you have any other constraint/formal approach to the prose in this story? Did the content dictate the form? Twilight is literally a magician, albeit a distracted one, and it seems to me that she wants to remake the world, take from it what she can and turn it into something new.

So to start our correspondence, I guess I’d first like to know how you started this story, and what tools and tricks, magic or otherwise, you used to construct this oddly beautiful, propulsive world.

Yours,

KKP

August 2017

Hi Kim,

There was a time when I didn’t mind flying, but now, it’s become a tolerated dread, a means to an end. I prefer train rides, and walking.

Just yesterday, I saw these children bouncing up and down on an abandoned couch, absolutely delighted and engrossed, their bangs drenched with sweat. I wonder, as a mother of two young children, how their play – or the play of other children pretending to be mauled by pigs – informs your reality, or otherwise. I’ve long wished to use a scene in which two young children, a boy and a girl, are playing OBGYN, though I haven’t found the appropriate story to place it!

Thank you for inaugurating our talk. I, too, am so happy to reconnect with you, and to speak with you about your story. But first, to address your questions.

I take small delight in the timing of this talk, given where I am now and where I was then, when the story first came about. It was spring, second year of my MFA. I had taken five days to visit my then-boyfriend in Seoul (he was serving in the compulsory army). As I waited for him to finish his duties during the day, I parked myself in a corner at a Starbucks near his base, and wrote a sentence: “When her great granddaughter was born, Big G was old and named her Twilight.” I had been hung up on the name, Twilight, for a while, and I had in mind a really old woman, much like my own great grandmother, who had pinched MSG into her coffee.

The story is anomalous to me in many ways. It was the fastest one I had ever completed – I started and finished the first draft during that five-day visit – and the published version remains, save for a few cuts, pretty much the same as that original (on average, I rework a story for years). In no way did I believe it was perfect. But in subsequent attempts at rewriting, I failed to tap into that particular mindset that had produced the crackle, the swiftness that dictated its cadence; the rubbing, as you call it. Each addition slowed it down. Each change felt it didn’t belong. It was as though the story was buffering itself against me.

I wonder how it was for you. Each line in “We Don’t Come Natural To It” is a shape, a weight, a sleight of reality. It really felt like stones accruing in my hands, so that by the end of the story, I was greatly and gravely weighed down by these things that I could feel, cold and grainy and shining.

Perhaps that’s how you managed to bring in homesickness, self-destruction, loneliness, rivalry and love, thinspiration and even office politics to pressing gimcrack desire. Do you hear the sentences first? What’re the steps you take, consciously or otherwise, to give such density to the language? How did you begin?

Aram

October 2017

Aram,

I love how you say the story buffered itself against you. That’s a perfect way to describe it—that way sentences sometimes band together and won’t budge. I felt that in “We Don’t Come” too. For the first few drafts, which I also started many years ago at Columbia, I felt like there was a kind of playful possibility on the page. And then, suddenly, I felt a shift and things began to settle. No matter how hard I tried, the story just wouldn’t let me fuck with it anymore.

Play informs so much of my life, writing and otherwise. First there’s the literal play that takes place in our house almost constantly—most notably, there is the longstanding game where my older son plays the father to my younger son. Sometimes my younger son is a mute boy called JJ, sometimes he is a sweet baby called Anjo (this is how my older son pronounces “angel”) and sometimes he is Eye-go, a kind of feral dogchild who has to be punished and tamed. Often their play consists entirely of them assuming these roles while playing other games: Daddy and Anjo might be drawing pictures together and JJ will interrupt that with a mimed request to play Candyland. Then Eye-go suddenly shows up to knock all of the pieces off the board. From the moment they wake up until the moment they sleep, my sons play at being other people. Do all children do this? Did you? I grew up as an only child, it wasn’t until I was much older that I suddenly had six stepsiblings (three from each new marriage) to navigate. By then I believed myself to be beyond play, or maybe I was protecting myself because these new kids were already enmeshed in their own games?

In writing, I have that same drive to inhabit “other” that my sons do, and the time I get to spend alone, away from these gorgeous, noisy children, is my playtime. It’s the only space where I don’t have to constantly respond to or anticipate the needs of others. Because I have very limited, specific times when I’m able to write, I’ll often compose a story acoustically, with a few sentences I say over and over in my head like a song. I’ll rework it while I’m doing other things, cooking or running bathwater, driving somewhere. When I sit down to write for those six hours a week, I know exactly where I’ve left off, and I know what’s coming next, at least for a little while.

Your lines are so stunning at the sentence level it seems to me you must “hear” them as well. And I wonder about your writing routine? And how you found Korea this time around—had it changed? Had you?

Yours,

KKP

December 2017

Kim,

Can we say that through no (real) fault of our own, our correspondence has been so delayed by life things that by the time I write this, my second response to you, I am yet again on a plane to Korea, for the fourth and final time this year? Thrilling occasions have happened for you in the meantime – your books are forthcoming! – not to mention the day-to-day caring of small children. What of me? I have a job that requires that I sit on planes and look down at water I cannot see. I have a father who needs more care than I can give without losing grace. I have two dogs. They sound trivial, and yet.

You ask about my writing routine. I think it was Tobias Wolff who said that writers must fight fiercely for their time to write. I’ve been trying to do this without being an asshole to those whose money or love I need to survive. You know, I always thought I was serious about writing – seriously committed to the entire writing process. I could be living alone in a foreign country where people spoke scant English and still, I would write. And I did. But I could never find the time to be serious enough. It’s only in recent years that I’ve prioritized writing in practice. And it’s been a strange relief to finally put to page the sentences and scenes that have been internalized all those years and observe as they take hold. I trust it must be a similar thrill for you to connect the week’s sentences to those of the previous, concretizing the acoustics to something more living, seeing more wholly the story to come.

And what acoustics you must hear, surrounded by the sincerity of childhood; the intimacy between the brothers, their urgency to connect. I imagine you beholding the play of Daddy and Anjo (or Eye-go) and thinking this is too good to be true…

Then again, maybe you’re more familiar with this reliance, the way we attach ourselves to our stories, how we hear them, see them in the gestures of strangers, feel their shape in the landscape. Our need to inhabit the “other,” as you say, the urgency to connect in ways we have chosen for ourselves. And though as writers that means, at least to me, a lot of quiet observation, I have come to find solace in the compassion I have learned. Especially in Korea, where I had for far too long allowed myself to indulge in the notion that pity is a form of giving when in fact it is nothing more than a division, a way to disconnect myself from the rest – all the ugly I didn’t know how to reconcile. I have spent a good portion of the last decade feeling the wrong emotions. Then again, I guess that’s growing up.

I’ve strayed from our initial intent, haven’t I? I have so much more I want to ask you about “We Don’t Come,” your inner resources, about life in general. I guess this means that we’ll have to continue talking, preferably over a good cocktail. Until then, be well and happy, Friend. I miss you.

Aram

January 2018

Dear Aram,

Maybe straying from intent was our intention all along—so nice to receive another gorgeous letter from you. Things that might surprise you: in the months since we’ve been writing, Anjo and Eye-go have disappeared (JJ still shows up sometimes). My family and I moved away from the river and to a house up in the hills. The book deal means my writing time has suddenly expanded, and to be honest, it’s completely fucking up my flow. But I love that you are once again in Korea. Everything has changed and everything is the same. In fact, I’m taking your cyclical travel as a sign that this correspondence is precisely the correct length—that our slow, meandering replies are by design.

Your books are forthcoming, too, you know, and I can’t wait to read them. You’ve always been serious about writing—I can see it in every line of your prose. And dogs are no joke! There’s absolutely no hierarchy to caregiving, whether in the service of lovers or children or animals or aging parents. Everything that isn’t the work gets in the way of the work, but of course the real stories are found in the distractions. I spend a lot of time scheming to get breaks from my life but then the kids will say something that beats any line I could dream up in a room by myself. They’ve gotten kind of macabre lately, which I love. My younger son has started calling clouds “sky ghosts.” He calls shadows “wall bruises” and crows “day bats.” My older son says there’s a girl made of garbage who lives in our walls—he can hear her rustling at night. (“She’s not scary!” he insists.) The work is embedded in the people we love, in the gestures of strangers, as you said, and the shape of the landscape. Maybe everything we need can be found simply by paying attention.

I think about all of the other ways these letters could have turned out and it’s a kind of mourning, all of the questions I couldn’t ask you or respond to as deeply as I would have liked. I want to leave you with this: once at Columbia, more than ten years ago, you were there for me when I got a phone call with news of a family tragedy. Do you remember this? We were only acquaintances then, and you came out into the hallway where I was standing, too stunned to move. I told you what was going on and you flew into action. You told me to breathe and you helped me get down the stairs and out of the building. You told our professor what was going on so I didn’t have to say those words again. But more than that, you ushered me into the rest of my life, which had changed forever. Maybe that sounds dramatic, but even now I turn that moment over in my mind when I need proof that there is grace and kindness in this world. I feel so lucky to have connected with you—first at school many years ago, then through your story, and now through these letters. There’s so much more to say, but there always is, isn’t there?

Yours,

KKP